Empire

Barren

Bent old woman, past
all youth, her been-
there- done-
that — sufficient. “Can’t
teach an old dog new tricks, you
know”, I know, everyone agrees
with a shrug.

All things are best left
exactly as growth and evolution left
them and once maturity has been reached
there is no Hope of newness. “We must
freeze-dry our flowers, my children,” she says, “glOry
in the supple past, and hang on, by tooth or by claw
to our habits, our habits,
our habits…”

}Maneuver, arrange, divide soul
from soul{:
rather than reach for an honest,
sober vision of glorious age, she lapses
into neglect and well reasoned defeat:

“I’m afraid these rheumatic joints
have all they can do, Love[, I’m afraid.

I’m afraid]…”

*~*~*

Her face is marred, not
by the lines time saw fit to place there,
but only by veil upon veil
of deceit drawn between her face
and the world, lessening her vision of
what is, her action now
by rote along a narrow path, her speech sharper, her heart
cloistered
in a dark, airless
tomb.

She is not marred by lines. She merely
(from beneath those protective veils) laughs
in God’s face, like
barren
Sarai.

c. Mary Kathryn Gough
9/23/08 train back from blackpool / edit: nov 23 2010 10.17 pm bckhm / edit: 22.4.12 9.53 pm wales /edit: 12.july.12 12.11 am wales

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The Papacy in the Middle Ages

While this is not my best paper on merit of its writing style alone, I believe it to be a topic worth deep consideration…
* ~ * * ~ *

The Papacy in the Middle Ages

According to an expert on monastic reform, “The second half of the eleventh century and the first half of the twelfth was one of the most significant periods in what may be called the social history of Christianity, when traditional institutions and attitudes were stretched to the maximum and made to accommodate new forms of life and new sentiments” (Constable, Reformation and the Twelfth Century). The ‘traditional institutions’ referred to here are monasteries and the Catholic Church (in particular, the Papacy). The changes that took place during this time revolved around a struggle between the Crowned King, Henry IV and the Pope, Gregory VII.. Each was trying to gain power over the other, thereby insuring superior power over the entire realm. The strain between the two powers had always been there, and the uncertainty and gray areas between temporal authority and spiritual authority were ever subtly shifting and wreaking havoc within the supposed unity of the Church. In the meantime, while the king and the pope were arguing over the secular domain, monasteries were gaining power in the spiritual domain. Their influence swept throughout the land, and because the Christian world began to have an example of what it was like to be truly spiritual they clustered to the monasteries to hand over their lives fully to God and the good of His creatures. Some came simply because in a monastery there was a dependability, a regularity to life— they knew that their basic needs would be met there. But droves of people flocked to these simple havens where one’s only focus need be God, obedience, and love.

Pope Gregory VII and Henry IV’s correspondence shows an incredible kind of hatred, a hatred that feeds on the spirit of Truth. The propaganda and twistedness apparent in these letters shows neither to be acting honorably in any way at all towards each other, and the further one reads, the more obvious it becomes. Henry had made alliances that were unacceptable to the Pope, alliances which could be threatening, and refused to cut off communication with them. He was also allowing simony in his realm, this being the practice of obtaining positions of power within the Church, and besides the fact that this was wrong in and of itself, some of the simoniac bishops were abusing the power they had bought. At least that was what Gregory accused them of. He was all out to get them though. He wanted to show them all up as the worst of sinners and needing the forgiveness of (and therefore the higher power of the Church to cleanse them and give them back their authority) well…himself.

This argument goes all the way back to when Charlemagne was King of France. He gathered scholars around himself as he was attempting to resurrect the Roman empire who translated and preserved things from that time period, and they left behind them a concept of kingship which drew both from the Bible and from Roman times. This was the idea that the ruler was Christ’s vicar, that ‘the king’s authority… was not merely secular, nor was obedience to him merely a secular duty. These were the kind of ideas which lay behind the eleventh century claim of Gregory of Catino: ‘Divine scripture admonishes us that we ought to understand that the king is the head of the church.’’ (Keen, 65).

Cardinal Hildebrand was elected Pope in 1073 as Pope Gregory VII, and he was dead set against the papacy being in any way dependent on the empire or the emperor. He wanted the Church to be able to choose its leaders on its own, and he did not want the emperor and secularity interfering in the business. That’s really what his whole life was about. He had spent twenty years setting things up and arranging this and that, influencing who he could towards this goal: making the Church the supreme power over the land, to have the last say in all matters, because really everything was spiritual in one way or another and the way he saw it a secular leader should not be allowed to rule in the spiritual realm. Henry was a child when his father died, and so Gregory (Hildebrand at the time) had had all the time he wanted to plan and scheme and figure his way around this problem in the political turmoil after Henry III died.

When Henry IV became king, everything was in place and Gregory was able to pursue his dream. He excommunicated a group of bishops whom Henry was close to and this started the wheels turning. He demanded that Henry cut off all contact with the renegade bishops, but Henry refused. Henry saw through his machinations and (though by no means innocent for his own part) gathered all his bishops around him and protested Gregory’s intentions, demanding that he descend and lay down the papacy. They claimed that he was no longer Pope, ‘but false monk’ (Geary, 280). They went through a series of promises and promise-breaking on the part of Henry IV and excommunications and forgivings on the part of Gregory VII. There was one memorable scene where Henry stood barefoot in the snow, wearing rags for three days, groveling for forgiveness from the pope so that he could be readmitted back into the Church. Because when he was excommunicated from the Church he basically had no official authority at all. He was a false king, and no matter how many people remained true to him he did not have the right to rule. It was a rather desperate measure for Gregory to excommunicate him, but he was determined and desperate to dominate in the situation. They played at this tug of war for about five years, and then in 1080 Gregory excommunicated Henry once and for all. Later his son, Henry V, would make an incredibly important compromise at the Concordat of Worms (1122), where spiritual and temporal authority were officially distinguished from each other in writing, and there was finally a concrete way to know what one owed the Church and what one owed the king.

The monasteries also were gaining influence during this time. Religious influence. Benedict’s Rule was the rule the monasteries had followed for ages, but now they were beginning to focus on praying for society— intercessory prayer— as opposed to Benedict’s simple retreat from the world and its ways. People flocked to the monasteries, both for material and spiritual reasons. Children were dedicated at birth to monastic lives, as this was the best way many parents could see to provide for them and to make sure they did not lead spiritually insignificant lives. Monastic ties gave a peasant and his family protection in that as serfs and workers of a monastery’s land, their well-being was secured. The monasteries began to be important in to more than just the laymen, however. Cluny was a monastery founded in Burgundy in 910 by Count William of Auvergne, and this marked the beginning of a huge change, which saw monks and abbots gaining significant moral influence over political figures and powerful figures in the Church, as well as laymen. But it was moral influence. They were stuck in their monasteries for the most part, although a few particular abbots did travel. Although their land came from political authorities (and it wasn’t until Boniface VIII that the clergy were relieved of the duty to pay taxes on their land), the monks had by far the most deep and important role in society. It was a society that (as a whole) took for granted that there were spiritual things at work behind everything invisibly, and that gave the monks a highly respected position as those who lived higher up and closer to those spiritual powers. Closer to God. Powerful people began to consult them from all over, asking for their wisdom in one situation or another until almost nothing was done without their advice being asked. It was truly an amazing situation.

The social history of Christianity includes some major changes in the second half of the eleventh century and the first half of the twelfth— changes that meant a whole new world, politically and spiritually. Both Henry IV and Gregory VII and later Henry V contributed to a definition of the difference between spiritual authority and temporal authority, drawing lines for future generations about where allegiances were due in what situations. The uncertainty and gray areas between temporal authority and spiritual authority were finally resolved, at least to a certain extent. The monasteries’ influence increased an incredible amount during this time as well, especially over the common man. They became ‘fortresses of prayer’ (Keen, 62) rather than simply escapes from the extravagance and worldliness of the culture of the day. People’s focus became more spiritual in nature, and they desired to live closer to God— or at least to understand the invisible forces at work behind everything they experienced. The wisdom of these prayerful men often guided those in political papal power. These historical events and the tides they created meant a lot for the future development (and demise?) of ‘The Christian World’.

Katie Huffman (married, Gough) / History 263 A / ProfessorVan Liere / Take-Home Essay, Exam 1

c. Mary Kathryn Gough

Empire Ruling Techniques

1Marykathryn Huffman (mar: Gough) / 2/16/06 J. Bratt / Essay 1; STBR 372

Ruling Techniques of the British Empire

 After losing Calais in France in 1558, England’s attention spread essentially everywhere. Soon its focus was almost entirely on building an empire across the Atlantic Ocean and in India. After somewhat of a trial run in Ireland, England moved on to the Americas. Rationalizing with all kinds of well-spoken intentions of righting what the Spanish were bungling up terribly, they ended up holding to a very similar operative ideology as was seen in the conquest of Ireland. This geo-strategic colonization, besides allowing them to one-up Spain, also quite conveniently accomplished several other things. It expelled disagreeable and unproductive people from the country, serving as what one visitor termed ‘a refuse heap’ for Britain (re: Barbados, RAFotBE, 37). It converted a social debit into a social asset, placing these disagreeable people in a place where either they died or proved some use to the empire, harvesting where Britain itself had not sown. Also, the trade between these places and the travel required the building of ships and created all kinds of jobs that did not exist before, almost literally creating an exchange of money out of thin air which boosted the British economy. It was a win-win situation all around, in the eyes of England. Its various methods of rule, thoroughly intertwined with the economic intricacies and the volatilities of different populations brought it to a different end in each place– North America, the West Indies, and India

Those who left their homes in Britain or somehow gathered enough money to board a boat and travel overseas to the Americas often had to sell everything they had, including land that had been in the family for generations. Betting everything on a dangerous voyage, they set out for a life-threatening and inarguably toilsome way of life once their destination was reached. Many colonists were not in fact voluntary travellers, but were coerced into their voyage through life circumstances or even kidnapping, becoming indentured servants upon reaching land. Early on there were few women travelling to overseas, and most colonies had many more men than women simply because of the work required to begin and maintain life under the conditions there. The Massachussetts Bay Company in the 1630s was the most idyllic and successful colony (RAFotBE, 39). This colony was full of families which meant that the sex ratio was very balanced (as opposed to Jamestown in Virginia, which was populated mainly by enterprising young rich men with no real skills who starved to avoid work, preferring to gamble and complain in discomfort). Massachussetts had high nutrition, literacy levels, voting rates, and family and town centered communities. The key ingredient in developing and keeping all of this was religion; these were not people who came to New England intending to strike it rich, but rather hard-working, God-fearing people who held in common a desire to contribute to each other’s lives. Rather than having a strong drive to put as much difference between themselves and their neighbors as possible, their goal was a holy commonwealth; their individual aims were modest. Many of the people who made up this community were varied artisans of the middle class, and this helped with the balance of work in the colony. But Massachussetts was a lonely star among many poorer examples of communal living; due to bad luck or bad discipline in the harsh unfamiliar land, many colonies lived in misery, toiled to no end, took by force, or just failed and died. Life was hard.

By the 1700s though, the colonies in New England were beginning to flourish. Women were healthy enough to live through multiple childbirths — the survival rates of the women and their babies at this time in the colonies was the highest in the known world. By the late 1700s the population of the colonies was doubling every twenty years, and the colonists were getting so numerous that they were no longer without question dependent on Britain. Britain therefore begins worrying about how they can keep this lucrative asset on a leash — the seeds of the American Revolution. New England had now worked through its dangerous infancy and youth, and had reached a stage of adolescence where it was, in a sense, seeking recognition as an adult. This was said in so many words by some leaders of the day. Britain, however, was becoming deeper and deeper in (war) debt, and needed the colonies to bolster it as it sought to make up for huge amounts of money. America saw this as an overbearing and unnecessary wielding of might — selfishness on a national scale, and refused to pay their own way. England and France were at war again as well, and when the fighting broke out on American soil, the set up for the Revolution and America’s declaration of freedom was complete as eventually the Americans and the French fought the English together. In this way, Britain lost half its empire in the west.

The other half, the Caribbean, was preserved and remained in English hands. In New England many of the structural hierarchies were preserved and submitted to in the same manner as in England — property and wealth and gentlemanliness being symbols of power commanding respect and obedience — but in the Caribbean the increasing slave population and the resulting chaos of emotion and uncertainty made more stringent laws and their enforcement necessary. These were sugar plantations, as opposed to the colonies in New England, in which people settled into more of a town or community structure. The color of one’s skin determined one’s place in the social hierarchy here more than anything else. In 1673 the ratio of slaves to whites was approximately 3:2, and as more and more work was done by slaves the white population decreased even as the slaves continued to flood in, and in 1712 the ratio of slaves to whites became almost 3:1 (RAFotBE, 41). In 1690 the slave trade was thrown open to private enterprise and this acted like a bomb on the industry. By 1715 the trade is dominated by the English, and it is the most lucrative commodity in the Empire, ‘commodity’ being thought of in the most positive way. Unsurprisingly, given the racial inequality of the region, there was a lot of insecurity among the whites here. This was shown clearly by an uprising in 1690 where 500 slaves killed several whites on a plantation in the middle of one island (RAFotBE, 42). The working conditions were horrendous, and many of the slaves worked in the hot sun over boiling liquid for much of the day. But this treatment was justified by the slaves’ skin color — they were obviously inferior for many reasons, not the least of which being their ‘barbarous, wild, savage natures’ (RAFotBE, 42). Given how many many blacks there were compared to whites, the whites began to fear the possibility of a massive, bloody rebellion and uncontrollable destruction. The overall emotion was one almost of paranoia. And yet the economic gains from Barbados and the West Indies were meaningful — one little island was more precious to England than the whole of Canada. Most of what came from these islands was “white gold”, or sugar. Also tobacco, tea, rum, and slaves were constantly in transport across the ocean. In order to keep this valuable resource in line, Britain laid out and enforced harsh laws, subjecting slaves to even more brutal and inhuman treatment. Scapegoat theory at the heart of its being most admirably played out. Trample on one people for the sake of another people and yourself, and gain the loyalty of an area through the resulting unity of purpose or need.

During this time, England’s East India Company was exploding in growth. With the resources it had gained from the Americas as well as its own resources, it was able to trade everywhere. Having set up colonies in India for the first time around 1660 as well, there was a massive trading business spread over two oceans and across much of the globe. The biggest export from the colonies in India was cotton, which was used for all sorts of things including underwear for the common people (rich people used linen, which was quite expensive). Tea was another big export of India, especially as the common people began to be able to buy china by way of the Dutch, who started making Delftware in imitation of the Chinese. Sugar completes the picture and you have the ingredients for the tradion of hospitality that has developed in Britain today of sitting guests down for tea. Originally it was the new cool thing to do for the less-than-wealthy classes, to be able to make a show of being able to get costly imported items for less. In 1760 the British defeat the French in India and just as North America moves beyond its reach a whole new spectrum of possibilities opens up. And yet the British government began to fall in with Adam Smith’s economic theories in about 1793, and the East India Company began to lose its monopoly, as the King was its chief investor (RAFotBE, 123). Soon it found other ways to continue its trade, as the cotton industry moved from India to Lancashire and getting tea from China in exchange for Bengali opium, but it was nowhere near as massive as it had been (RAFotBE, 123). The technique of expansion used in India wouldn’t be well-described by the word conquest; it was more of an infiltration, a slow erosion — perhaps a kind of seduction. India was both culturally and economically a very rich land, and the way England had dealt with the West Indies and New England and Ireland simply could not be repeated. The people had been there for a long time and were well developed culturally — in some ways India’s rootedness and richness loomed intimidatingly over England’s short history and religiously disjointed past. In no way could these people be construed as inhuman, barbaric, or in need of help like the savages the Brits had come into contact with in previous countries. Their tactic here was subtle and political, as the muslim Mughal empire began to decline and they saw that the new political situation allowed for increasing and well-placed leverage and exploitation.

By 1815, Britain had gained an empire across the Atlantic Ocean, lost a goodly portion of it, and turned its attention to retaining the West Indies and to building another empire in India. The intricacies of interdependent economies and the unpredictable emotions and fears of multi-ethnic populations made it necessary to use different methods of rule in these three domains. North America looked to be a spoiled oldest child, given much leeway originally and almost ignored except for the economic wealth they were able to offer the empire. When the laws needed to be tightened finally, when England was strapped for cash because of its war with France, New England simply refused to be taken for granted any longer. War ensued, and England lost half its empire in the West. In the West Indies the population differences caused the whites there to be rife with fear and suspicion, and the laws were strict and harsh for the negro slaves who worked in such horrible conditions on the sugar plantations. This was needed. In India, the careful infiltration of the political situation in the 1700s seemed to give due respect to the people there, but nevertheless slowly undermined their own control of their country. The lassaiz-faire (sp?) approach in New England failed outright, the West Indies were held in an iron fist, as it were, and remained there, and India was given the right to be itself but deceived and overpowered in the end.

Britain in India: World War I through the 1960s

Marykathryn Huffman
(mar. Gough)
4/24/06 Prof. Bratt
STBR 372 Essay #3

By 1914, India had long been subjected to the harsh treatment of Imperial Britain, a country used to enforcing their rule militarily. India’s population was used heavily and thoughtlessly in the wartimes of the early twentieth century. This was in part because the empire, when it entered World War I “covered a quarter of the earth’s land surface and had a population of 425 million of whom 366 million were coloured, and of these, 316 million lived in India” (353, James). Racism ran rampant in the fighting ranks. Government discrimination was highlighted by the circumstances, as the British tommy was trusted and admired, the independent Australian soldiers despised, and the coloured were distrusted and disrespected (354-5, James). Convinced even yet of their superiority, the British “ruthlessly exploited [India’s manpower] to… [support] the imperial armies on every front” (353, James).

Instituting British education for Indians in India had had the ‘undesirable’ by-product of nurturing in the nation as a whole a deepened and more informed desire for self-government (414-415, James). As Indians began to lay hold of the intellectual tools now necessary to legitimately lay their case on the table and be heard in their own society, Britain entertained their plea — to an extent. During World War I, India threw itself into the war against Hitler with vigor and sincerity, providing both men and money for the Imperial army. Britain’s ‘thank you’ was a commitment “to policies designed to set India along the road to ‘responsible government’ within the empire. Originally the promise had been for ‘self government’ but Curzon had objected” (415, James). The British majority just didn’t believe that India could create, support, or maintin peace on its own if given ‘self-governement’. India was a nation split by the ancient and often explosive tensions existing between Hindus and Muslims, and some would have said that the British “cynically exploited racial and religious antipathies in order to ‘divide and rule’ ” (412, James).
From about the year 1919, Gandhi “was the conscience of the [Indian National C]ongress, [and] wished all Indians to remain a simple folk, …encourag[ing] them to cultivate the agrarian virtues which he believed would regenerate India” (413, James). Gandhi tried to limit violence coming from the popularization of his resistance, but in 1922 he was arrested and sentenced to six years in prison, though he was then released two years later for health reasons (http://bartleby.com/67/2436.html). After several more imprisonments and releases — and his famous fast unto death — Gandhi officially resigned from congress in 1933, though he still unofficially retained his importance and position to a degree (http://bartleby.com/67/2443.html). The Muslim League, on the other hand, was led by Dr. Muhammad Jinnah, and while in 1919 the League worked with the mostly Hindu Congress to a large degree, the more powerful the Congress became the less the League trusted them. In the ensuing two decades, they became more and more antagonistic to a whole-India solution, and worked towards partition and the granting of Pakistan as their own independent Muslim state (423, James). Relations between Hindus and Muslims were so strained in the late 1920s that even a simple argument between two young boys quickly escalated into a violent ten day riot (413-4, James)! Salman Rushdie portrays this general phenomenon very well in several scenes of his novel, Midnight’s Children. Because of this explosive tension, Nehru and others considered religion “India’s greatest bane” because of the “dogmatism and narrow-mindedness [it fostered]” and the way it set the stage for the violence and discrimination that discredited them as one unified, responsible people (413, James).

In 1919, on April 13th, was the Amritsar Massacre — Rushdie has a stunning treatment of the Massacre in Midnight’s Children as well. In this tragic act of controlling violence, 379 people were killed and 1200 were wounded — and punishment of the British general responsible was both ‘belated and mild’ (http://bartleby.com/67/2433.html). Close to Christmas that year, the Government of India Act introduced new reforms that showed some amount of success here and there, but the amount of responsibility actually laid on Indian officials was still minimal and very controlled (http://bartleby.com/67/2433.html). During World War II, India found itself trying (in the footsteps of WWI Ireland) to undermine British imperialism and get around it where possible. As James points out, “divisions over what, if any, part it ought to play in India’s struggle against Naziism and fascism contrasted with Congress’s determination to use the war as a chance to squeeze concessions from Britain” (424, James). However the moral factors in Britain’s involvement in the war (i.e., fighting a despicable form of government) made it difficult for India to throw itself very strongly against the empire. On August 8th of 1940, Britain had offered India ‘partnership and a new constitution’ once the war was over, but India had refused, demanding immediate independence and holding to that demand when the war ended; unwilling to receive autonomy at Britain’s hand, they demanded instead that Britain leave India (the Quit India campaign) (http://bartleby.com/67/2446.html).
World War II caused a sort of civilian version of shell-shock which psychologically shifted the public opinion of the actual value of Imperialism. In part because of this shift, for the first six months of 1942 the United States began pushing Britain to come to some sort of terms with the Indian Congress. However Congress, Gandhi, and the League were all discredited by the obvious lack of internal harmony in India displayed by the Quit India campaign, and U.S. support for an agreement with India fell sharply. Always before, Britain felt much better about granting independence to a colony, if simply because they were already used to political life. But in India it was so new, and had its roots almost solely in and motivated by the desire to get rid of its foreign rulers, that Britain felt that it was leaving a shallow system that hadn’t gained any part of maturity yet (544-545, James). The definition of national maturity, however, is murky and convoluted. Governmental and political maturity cannot be richly ripe enough for naturalization until the nation within and its constituent individuals have reached a truly loving, creative maturity themselves. One must ask, does that ever happen?
Upon coming out of the war it became clear, in spite of Britain’s dubiousness and hesitancy, that Indian self-government wasn’t an Indian pipe-dream any longer — it was only a matter of time. Though the consensus of outside powers seemed to be that it might not be safe to leave governing in Indian hands, the “question [was no longer] of how long the raj would last, but how it was to be dismantled and what would replace it” (427, James). Thus, Britain rolled up its collective sleeves and set-to organizing a peaceful and advantageous withdrawal from India and the colonies in which each territory would take over government for itself, becoming independent and productive on its own (542-547, James). “Never was an empire dismantled with such a sense of hope for the future,” James states; the officials involved in the passing on of responsibility saw themselves more as ‘midwives’ than workers in a funeral home (542, James). Throughout 1946, the Indian population grew increasingly violent, and the British drew up plans to flee before any peaceful accord had been reached or official transfer taken place. But Earl Mountbatten (and his charming wife) arrived in February of the next year, throwing his whole being into an effort to close matters and hand rule over before the nation literally bubbled with blood (549-551, James). The date of independence was to have been in June of 1948, but in light of the threat of civil war and the efforts of the Mountbattens, India’s independence process was quickened and occurred on August 15th, 1947 (552, James). Clement Attlee, the Prime Minister, had taken a special interest in withdrawal from India, and personally sent the Mountbattens to take over the situation. Attlee had made a few concessions he had disliked, as they were not in Britain’s favor, ultimately trade-wise and positionally because of the Cold War. One of these was the concession of a partitioned India, where Hindu and Muslim land would be parted with an official line, and each would operate independently of the other. Already the two groups were acting independently from each other. Inevitably the line could not be drawn such that Hindus and Muslims were really parted, and unfortunately many were left just slightly in the other religious group’s territory, feeling threatened and alone — however, many of these moved. Upon being granted independence, there was massive bloodshed in India– maybe 500,000 deaths, although no one knows exactly (553-554, James). Religious fear and hatred took the country by the throat and crushed millions of lives without restraint or compassion. The establishment of the two groups’ separateness refused to come about without a violent show of independence in the form of inflicting suffering and causing blood to flow. Even Gandhi was a victim of the wild changes in people’s hearts and the burning desire for deserved recognition that bubbled to the surface of the culture during this time (assassinated by a Hindu on Jan 30, 1948) (http://www.bartleby.com/67/3955.html). Strife continued as the two new territories struggled over Kashmir and other states. The government continued to seek organization and individuality at once, with some measure of success, although the fighting between Pakistan and India took ages to come fully to a stop, even when the issue was taken to the UN for support (http://www.bartleby.com/67/3956.html). A constitution was drafted, India declared a federal republic, and President Rajendra Prasad elected (January 26, 1950 – installed formally in 1952) (http://www.bartleby.com/67/3957.html). Months later, the Delhi Pact “between Prime Minister Pandit Nehru and Liaqat Ali Khan [promised] fair treatment to each other’s minorities” (http://www.bartleby.com/67/3957.html). Throughout the 50s, India worked on their relations with France, Portugal, the U.S., and the U.S.S.R., gradually becoming somewhat of a leader of the many small, anxious ‘post-colonial nations’ and other ‘nonaligned nations’ (http://www.bartleby.com/67/3957.html). Britain contributed to India and several other nations in the 50s with inclusion in The Colombo Plan, which aimed to help the countries economically each with a portion of 8 billion pounds over the course of six years (http://www.bartleby.com/67/3958.html). In October of 1955, a commission was set to reorganize the lines between states, as they had been drawn at independence by the British, according to regional, cultural, and ethnic ties expressed as simply as possible in linguistic similarities (http://www.bartleby.com/67/3960.html). This was able to relieve the arduous task of the hatred intrinsic to it (to some extent), as identity was described in different terms than those exclusively designating one’s religious affiliation. This took up quite a bit of the rest of the 1950s with tousling over lines and identities in the political arena.

In the end, Britain finally did pull out of India, due to post-war circumstances and to India’s continued insistence, with many doubts and fears but without much choice. Some of their worst fears came true. Atrocities and acts of terror and horror occurred all over the newly-split nation — exactly what Britain had been attempting to police and soften and change in their presence in the country. It is possible that their presence only exacerbated over years the emotions pent-up in Indian hearts. It is possible that their presence there simply added another layer to the layers and layers of maneuverings and lies through which the country had learned to find their way through together toward the future, a foreign layer that exponentially complicated the process of learning each other. Perhaps the civility they sought to donate to India could have been found in the rich wells of heritage the people had, as Gandhi indicated, and if Britain had simply listened and explored India as itself they would have been able to help the country heal itself. No one can say now, and speculation can only help us figure ourselves and our own future out. But what we can say is that the Indian people were deeply, irrevocably changed, and left to work toward an integration of states that wouldn’t have ever before been believed.

Bibliography

James, Lawrence. The Rise and Fall of the British Empire. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1994.
Rushdie, Salman. Midnight’s Children. London: Vintage, 1995.
Stearns, Peter N. ed. VI. “The World Wars and Interwar Period”, “The Contemporary Period”. The Encyclopedia of World History, Sixth edition. 2001; Houghton Mifflin Company. <http://www.bartleby.com/67/ (ff)>. accessed between May 2006 – December 29th, 2006.
Weil, Simone; Panichas, George A. The Simone Weil Reader. Rhode Island/London: Moyer Bell, 1999.

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Afternotes (no room at the inn…)

In the words of Simone Weil, in an essay titled ‘The Power of Words’, one might say that “in the end, a study of modern history leads to the conclusion that the national interest of every State consists in its capacity to make war. . . What is called national prestige consists in behaving always in such a way as to demoralize other nations by giving them the impression that, if it comes to war, one would certainly defeat them. What is called national security is an imaginary state of affairs in which one would retain the capacity to make war while depriving all other countries of it” (273, Weil). If that’s maturity, I’ll eat my hat! The definition of national maturity is very murky and convoluted. “Perfect love drives out all fear,” and governmental and political structures of any maturity cannot be richly ripe enough for naturalization until the nation within and its constituent individuals have reached a truly loving, creative seedling knowledge of themselves. It is not ripe until those who live in that structure have set their feet on the path toward that maturity ( i.e. not ‘toward that prosperity’), for the path toward maturity leads to ever-deeper love on as grand a scale as nations could wish. But the question remains, does that ever happen? And how?
My favorite example of this seedling self-knowledge and desire for maturity is the Velvet Revolution in ’89 in Czechoslovakia, now the Czech Republic and Slovakia. Massive non-violent protest ( i.e., velvet) intimidated the Communists into handing the country over to the people, who then voted a playwrite and political dissident named Vaclav Havel out of jail and into the interim (and 1st) presidency — because they loved him, trusted him, and because he’d given them heart and courage.
Reading about Imperialism this semester and considering how its ethic played out, I can’t help but think that we have much in common with the British Empire’s particular blindnesses. Believing themselves merciful and full of the best intent, they were far better at analyzing others than at analyzing themselves and humbling themselves under God’s mighty hand. They much preferred to use their own ‘mighty’ hand as they felt He intended, for maximum order and ‘civility’ and comfort. Thus, the goal was so tightly bound to the fruits of the labor that people were not really present, Be-ing, eyes fixed on the Savior in trust and humility. Wrong propagates unnecessarily in those circumstances.
Weil writes something else in the same essay which feels relevant to me. She says, “It is clear that neither absolute dictatorship nor absolute democracy exists anywhere, and that every social organism everywhere is a compound of democracy and dictatorship in different proportions; it is clear, too, that the extent to which there is democracy is defined by the relations between different parts of the social mechanism and upon the conditions which control its functioning; it is therefore upon these relations and these conditions that we should try to act. Instead of which we generally imagine that dictatorship or democracy are intrinsically inherent in certain groups of men, whether nations or parties, so that we become obsessed with the desire to crush one or the other of these groups, according to whether we are temperamentally more attached to order or to liberty” (275, Weil).
Does that, or does that not sound like us? Many would say that western democracy ought to be spread, like gospel-truth, everywhere. And yet, doesn’t Democracy itself seem to operate like another imperial power in its self-propagating efforts? Curiosity and concern drive me to ask: what do we do but take pride in our newer, ‘better’ standard of living, carelessly subverting the ageless wisdom of other Peoples with capitalistic products and advertising? I’m the first to attest to the power of the word/image, both seen and heard — but also to the fact that we hog it, world-wide, wherever possible. That has consequences, fully intentional or no. Everywhere, we are smothering or invalidating identities with the very Ideas of Democracy itself because we’ve left empathy by the wayside and respond only to our own feelings about what we see. I keep finding myself mentally stamping those bumper stickers that say “God bless America” underneath with the words: “with humility and wisdom”. After all, isn’t it the meek who inherit the Earth? How could we be so pretentious and hard-nosed?
Perhaps promoting the Empire as a thing-in-itself was one of the main mistakes, and had that not been done, a more modest Britain would have resulted. What would the world have looked like then? Could Britain, with its talented and brilliant figures, have survived walking a tightrope rather than packing down dirt under their feet all over the globe? …Can we?
Who are we?